Meteors and Northern Lights
15.08.2002

Skygazers report that the annual Perseid meteor shower went pretty much as predicted, producing a meteor every few minutes during the dark early morning hours of August 12 and 13. And as the constellation...

The Case of the Missing Aurora
21.10.1998

Sometimes, near midnight, auroras suddenly stop. Nobody knows why. This nightside gap in aurora was confirmed recently by D. Chua (U. Washington) and colleagues in data from the Ultraviolet Imager onboard the Polar spacecraft.

Aurora Over Alaska
4.03.1998

Higher than the highest mountain, higher than the highest airplane, lies the realm of the aurora. Aurora rarely reach below 60 kilometers, and can range up to 1000 kilometers. Aurora light results from solar electrons and protons striking molecules in the Earth's atmosphere.

Aurora In West Texas Skies
15.09.2000

The aurora borealis, or northern lights, are not a common sight in the southwestern United States. But a strong solar coronal mass ejection in early August triggered geomagnetic storms and aurora which were widely reported, even under west Texas skies.

Aurora Over Clouds
2.04.2001

Aurorae usually occur high above the clouds. The auroral glow is created when fast-moving particles ejected from the Sun impact air molecules high in the Earth's atmosphere. An oxygen molecule, for example, will glow in a green light when reacquiring an electron lost during a collision with a solar particle.

Auroral Rocket Launch
31.01.2003

In this striking image, a rocket climbs skyward toward an expansive green auroral display in the first launch of 2003 from the University of Alaska's Poker Flat Research Range. Recorded on January 27th...

Io Aurora
16.10.1998

Alluring aurora surrounding Io (eye-oh) appear as a ghostly glow while the volcanic moon orbits within Jupiter's dark shadow. Gas giant Jupiter is off to the right of this image, recorded in May by the robot Galileo spacecraft's solid state imaging camera from a distance of about 1.3 million kilometers.

Green Aurora Over Lake Superior
6.09.2006

What if your horizon was green? If you've got a camera, take a picture! That was the experience of Jeff Hapeman last week when visiting the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore in Michigan. On a quiet night toward the northern horizon over Lake Superior was a long lasting diffuse green aurora.

Saturnian Aurora
9.01.1998

Girdling the second largest planet in the Solar System, Saturn's Rings are one of the most spectacular sights for earthbound telescopes. This recently released image, from the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope's STIS instrument, offers a striking view of another kind of ring around Saturn - pole encircling rings of ultraviolet aurora.

Saturnian Aurora
17.09.2000

Girdling the second largest planet in the Solar System, Saturn's Rings are one of the most spectacular sights for earthbound telescopes. This image from the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope's STIS instrument, offers a striking view of another kind of ring around Saturn - pole encircling rings of ultraviolet aurora.